Saturday, 13 November 2010

Whilst I appreciate the old school sort of humour story telling nature of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s review of New Vegas, it harks back to the kind of shit they used to do in PC Zone in 1997, and I have had to resist the urge to do that sort of shit myself, it seems like Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has been broken by sequels.

“New Vegas is functionally just an expansion pack of Fallout 3 and I said everything I needed to say about Fallout 3 in my Fallout 3 review of Fallout 3.”

I’m not in favour of sequels generally either, Half Life 2 being the exception in terms of me actually wanting more of that story. In fact I think sequels, instead of having numbers should have the word "Again", so Assassin's Creed 2 would be called Assassin's Creed Again, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would be called Call of Duty Again, Again, Again: Modern Warfare Again. (can't remember if that idea is already on this blog so fuck it)

I wouldn’t have asked for New Vegas, I held out as little hope as possible, seeing as I’d wanted Fallout 3 to actually not be shit and was so, so disappointed. But as things turn out New Vegas rams the shit out of Fallout 3, so it’s all ok.

So, in this instance, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, we need to go beyond the standard Christian concepts of Good and Evil and judge each game on its own merits.

Fallout 3 defined the game Fallout 3, as you may well expect, but New Vegas is actually worth playing, being so much more refined, and subtle, and what a game should be. There’s nothing more to say about the engine, sure, but a game is not an engine and no one should ever buy New Vegas for the fucking engine.

Also, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw: reply to my fucking emails DAMN.

And, seriously, those “Day One” panel things in that New Vegas review went on for far too long.

Thursday, 4 November 2010

The amount of times I climb a hill, turn a corner, and I’m confronted by some huge valley or mountain range on Fallout: New Vegas is frankly ridiculous. The best part of Fallout 3 was when you left the vault for the first time. You’re on this ridge, and when your eyes adjust to the sunlight you can see this vast, lonely wasteland.

Except it’s not that lonely, it’s fucking annoying and every five seconds you’re attacked by some generic raider, a crazy robot, or a couple of wild dildos.

The only thing I liked about Fallout 3 was the feel of the wasteland, when no one was around. It evokes an overwhelming loneliness, which can be affecting, but by having hostiles randomly strewn throughout the world it, like a premature ejaculation, ruined entirely the atmosphere it had going on.

New Vegas doesn’t make the same mistake. In this game it’s rare to encounter animals wandering aimlessly in the desert. Humans tend to gather around camps. Scorpions pick around the ruins of a gas station, ants have colonised an old barn. Shit like that makes it feel like the world of New Vegas is a living one.

However, the openness of New Vegas means there is often very little tension in your travels. There are moments, for example your initial approach to the Strip, where the environment works particularly well, but at other times journeying around can be tedious, and I find myself leaping from rock to rock, perilously trying to descend a radioactive cliff face to get somewhere ten seconds faster. It more or less depends on my mood how I feel about this. If you're feeling sort of ponderous, it's kind of cool, trudging through the desert. But, man, it’s almost always great when you turn a corner and there’s this freaky forest, or a massive lake that appears out of nowhere. I am in awe a little bit of those things when I see them.

New Vegas is also like a better version of Red Dead Redemption. I liked that game, but not because of any kind of message it tried to tell me. It felt like it was trying to make this point about revolution, the rise to power, the impact of which was lost because even though it is an open world game, you’re basically following a script, killing certain people at the times you’re told to.

New Vegas deals with that. In Fallout 3 you couldn’t kill certain characters, because it would mess up quests. New Vegas doesn’t give a fuck. Normally, you kill a character, it affects your standing, and what quests are available, with a faction. Different NPCs belong to different factions and all your actions affect how they see you, a bit like when you make one Sim kill another in The Sims and those red minus signs appear above their girlfriends head. I mean what did you do in The Sims?

This system increases the level of interactivity in the game, making it unique from, say, a film, and thousands of other games, and making it feel like your actions and decisions have actual resonance in a world that could feasibly exist (sort of). I didn’t hate Red Dead, I thought it was a good game. It’s just a lot of things you’d do in that didn’t seem to affect anything at all, even though the events themselves seemed like they were meant to have significance.

For a world to feel lived in, in games, the characters need to feel real. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of a game that does this really well, as is New Vegas. You get a feel for various characters through quests that don’t involve combat, where you sometimes have to deduce things, or you can talk your way out of a potential conflict. It is a subtlety missing from most games.

One character you meet, when you ask about her goals, wants a dress. She’s also some kind of technical whiz, and she probably just punched the head off a guy, but when you talk to her she feels like a real person, not just a single purpose tool, and is captivating as a result. Conversations with characters have actually made me laugh because they contain actual jokes.

Dungeons are absent from this game, by which I mean the shit dungeons from Fallout 3 are gone. I stopped giving the tiniest bit of a fuck about dungeons in Fallout 3 after my second dungeon. Here’s what would happen: I’d find a dungeon, go inside, discover the interior of every single building had been designed by the same architect, explore the whole thing, find nothing of any consequence, grab some stimpaks and bottle caps and call it a day. It was like trying to jerk off and abandoning it half way through. And you’re masturbating over a picture of some rusty tins.

In New Vegas the buildings, vaults and things you can enter in the wasteland relate to various quests. It feels like they were built, like buildings in real life, for an actual reason, and they’re worth exploring to discover another angle to a quest, or the world.

Without Fallout 3 we wouldn’t have New Vegas, probably. That is the closest Fallout 3 will ever get to being worthwhile. I don’t know why Gamespot thinks Fallout 3 is better. They probably got erections from reading the words rusty and tins.

Yeah, frankly, I think it is. There is very little brilliance in games. It’s not even subtle stuff. “Brilliance”, it seems, games like Portal, Shadow of the Colossus (my go to games for “games that aren’t utter shit”), is just not doing the awful shit that games normally do.

Bioshock’s big point of “You are a mindless killer” is a point made in Half Life 2 in a much more gradual, subtle way, as you start to realize the character you control (ha ha) is under some kind of cosmic contract, and it seems you’re helping these people you’ve grown to like out of some arbitrary reason you have no way to comprehend.

But people, gamers, I guess, see guns, and aliens, and they want to shoot those aliens with those guns and so what if there’s some creepy guy with a briefcase, or it’s all under water, as long as your gun has a chainsaw on it.

In Half Life 2, yeah, you’re shooting guys, things, because you’re been told to, but, unlike Bioshock, it doesn’t act like some 1st year art school student trying way too hard to prove it’s different. It just gets on with being brilliant. Or shit, if you hated it.